Chapter 169Glossed Verse: A Yukar Heroic Epic and a Kamuy Yukar God-Song

169.1 The sung verse genres at a glance

Among Hokkaido Ainu narrative genres, two are sung verse: the heroic epic (yukar / sakorpe) and the divine epic (kamuy yukar / oyna). Both are performed in the elevated register (atomte-itak), both narrate their story in the first person from the protagonist's viewpoint, and both draw on a dense stock of formulaic couplets and parallelism. They diverge in several formal parameters that are diagnostically useful Satō (2008: 259); Endō (2022: §2.4.2–2.4.3):

Both genres are narrated in the first person using the fourth-person (indefinite) prefixes a= / =an (see the section on the fourth-person narrator, below) rather than the everyday first-person ku=. The register, verse form, and grammatical hallmarks they share are treated jointly here; the full genre taxonomy — including prose tales, prayer, and song — is set out in Chapter 149 (The Oral-Literature Genre System and Its Grammatical Signatures).

169.2 The heroic epic: yukar and sakorpe

The yukar is the longest and most prestigious genre in Hokkaido Ainu oral literature. The name itself encodes performance: Kayano glosses it as 'to imitate / mimic' — the narrator heard the story (perhaps in a dream) and now re-tells it Kayano (1996: s.v. yukar). In south-west Hokkaido the Saru and Chitose term yukar is standard; eastern varieties use sakorpe (lit. 'the thing with sakor') in Tokachi Endō (2022: §2.4.3). The Samani term yayerap and the prose-content alternative irupaye (yukar material recited without melody) mark additional regional and performative variation.

A yukar performance is sung to a melody that belongs to the narrator rather than to the story: each performer re-melodizes a borrowed narrative, and the tune may shift mid-performance Endō (2022: §2.4.3). The narrator and listeners keep time by beating the hearth-rim with a stick, repni ('rhythm-stick'), the act called rep ‘keep time’ Satō (2008: 259). Listeners may add a chorus (hetce). There is no fixed sakehe refrain, which is the single clearest formal contrast with the divine epic. Satō notes an opening formula eyororpe that may repeat at the very start of a performance and reads it as a possible vestige of a refrain that the heroic epic once shared with the divine epic ‹speculative› Satō (2008: 259).

The protagonist is a parentless superhuman youth — in Saru texts typically Poy-ya-un-pe or Pon Sinutapka-un-kur; in eastern Hokkaido Pon Otasam/Otasut-un-kur. The hero flies, dives, and travels underground; battles are not governed by a good-vs-evil worldview but by heroic competition Endō (2022: §2.4.3). Female protagonists appear in the menoko yukar subgenre, which keeps the heroic format but centres on marriage rather than battle. The term rametok ‘bravery; brave person; hero’ (ram-etok 'spirit-tip') stands alone for the hero-concept; a second term cipapa appears in Chiri Mashiho's Shinyōshū annotations but is not documented in other dictionaries aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (gengojiro, 2024-02-13, asserted) ‹speculative›.

The yukar is traditionally narrated by men; women tell the prose equivalent irupaye instead Satō (2008: 259). Modern revitalization practices have women reciting verse yukar, knowingly departing from the traditional allocation Endō (2022: §2.4.3). The gendered narrator convention connects to the broader pattern of genre allocation by sex treated in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers).

169.3 The divine epic: kamuy yukar, oyna, and Chiri Yukie

In the divine epic the narrator speaks in the voice of a deity — a kamuy: an animal, plant, fire, water, weather phenomenon, or object — telling its own story. The Saru/Chitose term is kamuy yukar; Tokachi uses oyna for the same genre Endō (2022: §2.4.2). The term oyna is, however, ambiguous across the dialect area: in coastal Hidaka and Iburi it labels a distinct genre whose protagonist is the culture-hero Oynakamuy (Aynurakkur / Okikurmi) and which uses no sakehe, while in Tokachi and Sakhalin it covers the divine epic proper Endō (2022: §2.4.4); Nakagawa (1995: s.v. oyna). At Saru, the term is absent from Hiraga Sadamo's (平賀サダモ) usage — she subsumed what Kindaichi and Kubodera classified as sacred biographies under her yukar label, a dialectally conditioned genre-boundary that resists a single universal taxonomy Tamura (1996: s.v. oyna) ‹contested›.

In contrast to the heroic epic, each kamuy yukar is sung to a fixed melody that belongs to the story itself, not to the narrator Satō (2008: 259). Performances are shorter (minutes to roughly an hour) and are associated traditionally with women narrators, though men may also perform them Endō (2022: §2.4.2).

The canonical published collection is Chiri Yukie's アイヌ神謡集 (Ainu Shin'yōshū, 1923) Chiri Yukie (1923), thirteen Horobetsu/Iburi kamuy yukar with parallel Japanese translation. Compiled by Yukie Chiri (知里幸恵, 1903–1922), it remains the most widely read primary text of Ainu oral literature and provides the main evidence for the Iburi convention of using the exclusive first-plural ci= / =as as a singular deity-narrator marker (see the section on fourth-person narration, below). The chapter title formulae in this collection — for example AEKIRUSHI — have been analysed as a=e-kir-usi 'the place one has memory of' (after 片山龍峯 2003) rather than as a reflex of ekiru 'turn back' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (0penke, 2024-03-19, proposed) ‹contested›.

169.4 The sakehe refrain

The sakehe (variant saha, Chiri 1955) is the defining feature of the kamuy yukar: a fixed, often semantically opaque refrain inserted into the narration. It is fixed per story — the same kamuy yukar story-type may carry a different sakehe in different localities Endō (2022: §2.4.2). See Chapter 151 (The Sakehe Refrain, Verse Meter, and the Structure of Sung Verse) for verse-structural detail; the present section concerns the grammatical and philological facts.

The word sakehe is the possessed form of sake ‘wine, sake’: sake-he, 'the sake of (something)'. Tamura's Saru dictionary distinguishes this accented form (sákehe 'melody; refrain') from the unaccented noun for 'sake-rice-wine' (also sake) Tamura (1996: s.v. sakehe). The formal identity of the two is reflected in line-internal puns where both readings are live simultaneously.

The sakehe is inserted every line or every few lines, depending on the story; the insertion pattern is fixed for a given text but not uniform across the genre Endō (2022: §2.4.2). The content ranges from the transparently onomatopoeic — the cuckoo-deity's sakehe han kakkok kakkok imitates its own call Endō (2022: §2.4.2) — to the semantically opaque. The function of the sakehe is debated: Nakagawa (2001b, via Endō (2022: §2.4.2)) holds that it originally indexed the protagonist, but many sakehe have no recoverable referential link; and the same story-type does not carry the same sakehe across localities ‹contested›.

The Biratori corpus preserves the narrator 貝澤とぅるしの (Kaizawa Turushino) explicitly labelling the phenomenon: after reciting the thunder-deity's refrain hum pakpak, she glosses it humihiruy だわ。sakehe. 'it's a loud sound — [that's] the sakehe' Biratori Ainu oral literature (1969). This is one of the clearest native metalinguistic testimonies on the genre term itself.

Similarly, the mid-Saru narrator 川上まつ子 (Kawakami Matsuko, ILCAA corpus) describes how the menoko yukar ('female heroic epic') differs from the prose alternative she uses: one is told with the sakehe (sakekoye), the other as an uwepeker (prose tale), and the version with sakehe runs long while the prose version is short ILCAA Ainu materials (1976).

169.5 Verse line and metre

Okuda's analysis of Hokkaido Ainu verse identifies two distinct metrical systems, deployed by genre and musical rhythm Okuda (2022: §3):

The syllable-count metre — with its 5-syllable basic line — was the established description from Kindaichi (1931) and Tamura (1973) onward Okuda (2022: §2.1). Okuda's addition is the accent-orientation metre identified in divine-epic texts. In his scansion of Amamecikappo narrated by Hatozawa Wateke (Monbetsu; Tamura 2001), 14 of 90 non-refrain lines are 4 syllables, and 12 of those 14 carry their first accent on syllable 1 — consistent with accent-orientation rather than syllable-count Okuda (2022: §3.3). The scansion pattern is illustrated below (● = first accented syllable):

Okuda further reports that the same reciters' lyric poems are overwhelmingly 5-syllable, confirming that the two systems are not speaker-dependent but genre- and rhythm-dependent Okuda (2022: §3.2). He claims no other language is documented to use two such metre types by one reciter Okuda (2022: §5.1). A further hypothesis holds that the syllable-count system entered Ainu via contact with the Japanese 7-5 mora metre, with accent-orientation as the native baseline — but Okuda notes there is no direct evidence for this at present Okuda (2022: §5.2) ‹speculative›.

On the question of rhyme and alliteration: Philippi (1979, via Okuda (2022: §2.2)) held that rhyme in Ainu verse is 'quite accidental' and alliteration 'sporadic'. Tangiku (2020), as reported from community discussion, argues that an 18th-century yukar text (ルウェサニウンクㇾ) shows deliberate head-rhyme, end-rhyme, and imperfect rhyme aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2023-12-13, asserted, citing Tangiku 2020) ‹contested›. The question of whether Ainu verse rhyme is a real compositional device or an artefact of a small phoneme inventory remains open.

To hit the target syllable count, poets employ a recognized set of techniques: formulaic verse phrases, syllable-appropriate word choice, presence/absence of final particles, insertion of the dummy verb ki ‘do’ between verb and following element, uncontracted ku- person marker, a line-initial prefixed u, and the suppression of vowel elision that occurs freely in prose speech Okuda (2022: §2.1); Satō (2008: 264).

169.6 Fourth-person narration: the hero or deity as speaker

All sung verse genres, and prose narrative as well, are told in the first person from the protagonist's point of view throughout, with a closing identification formula revealing who 'I' was Endō (2022: §2.4); Satō (2008: 259–261). The 'first person' is, however, expressed not by everyday ku= (1SG) but by the fourth-person set: transitive-subject a=, intransitive-subject =an, object i= (Saru / Chitose baseline) Satō (2008: 260–261); Bugaeva (2008: 40–44). The typological status of this convention — whether it represents genuine first-person narration throughout or a logophoric construction framing the whole text as a reported speech act — is unsettled Bugaeva (2008: 40–44); Satō (2004) ‹contested›. The logophoric analysis is developed in Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse).

Satō (2008: 259–261) offers a pragmatic motivation he calls the indirection principle (間接性の原理): oral literature originated as a deity's narration inside a dream, and the taboo on a deity addressing a living human directly motivates a non-everyday first-person marker that increases indirectness Satō (2008: 259–261). He presents this explicitly as a hypothesis of his own, dissenting from the standard 'shamaness-oracle origin' theory (巫女の託宣起源説) ‹contested›. The discourse–narration connection is taken up in Chapter 155 (Narrative TAM and Evidential Patterning by Genre).

169.7 Grammatical hallmarks of the verse register

Both genres use the elevated register (atomte-itak, lit. 'decorated language'), which differs from everyday speech (yayan-itak) along four grammatical parameters identified by Satō Satō (2008: 263–264):

169.8 Parallelism and formulaic phrasing

Couplets and parallel lines are the backbone rhetorical device of both sung genres Satō (2008: 264); Endō (2022: §4). Lines do not need to rhyme or metrically match to count as a couplet — the requirement is semantic or structural correspondence only. The most productive template is tu … / re … 'two … / three …', which does not mean an exact count but a rhetorical plural ('many'): otu maw-kur-puni kane / ore maw-kur-puni kane 'raising two winds / raising three winds' (= many winds) Satō (2008: 264). Formulaic descriptive phrases are memorized in bulk and redeployed across texts, serving syllable-count requirements while conveying conventional praise or scene-setting; for example, tuk-no pinni si-kopa-yar / aynu pito 'a fine person like a grown Manchurian-ash tree' (containing si-kopa-yar 'like', not used in everyday speech) Endō (2022: §4). The full couplet and word-pair inventory is treated in Chapter 152 (Parallelism, Couplets, and Word-Pair Doublets).

Reference-tracking across the long stretches of yukar narration relies on the same fourth-person set throughout, with quotative sekor + speech verb (ye, hawki, isoytak) closing and re-opening direct-speech frames. The density of sekor in verse is addressed under Chapter 139 (Reference Tracking and Argument Continuity) and Chapter 105 (Quotative Complementation and Reported Speech (sekor)); the reportative tail hawe ne / hawe as as a narration-closure device is treated in Chapter 123 (hawe ne — the Reportative / Hearsay Evidential).

169.9 Genre-boundary debates

Several questions about the verse genres remain open in the literature:

Is Ainu oral literature genuine first-person literature? The uniform use of the fourth-person set throughout all three narrative genres is typologically unusual. Whether it constitutes true first-person (direct-style) narration or a logophoric construction that frames the entire text as reported speech is unsettled Endō (2022: §2.4); Bugaeva (2008: 40–44) ‹contested›.

Genre-boundary cases. The aynu-corpora community has identified 織田ステノ's kamuy yukar '怠け者の子供' as resistant to genre classification: it has a long sakehe (*manayta sanke tar panke tar kocupu*) but a short body and ends as a yayeisoytak (self-narration) by a human boy — 'neither kamuy yukar nor yukar, and (having a melody) not prose' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (gengojiro, 2025-12-12, proposed) ‹contested›. This is consistent with Endō's own caveat that regional genre inventories do not map cleanly onto any single scheme Endō (2022: §2.5).

The residual refrain. Satō's reading of the opening eyororpe as a vestige of a lost yukar refrain is an inference without independent textual support Satō (2008: 259) ‹speculative›.

Two metres or one? The long-standing syllable-count description (Kindaichi 1931; Tamura 1973, via Okuda (2022: §2.1)) and Okuda's accent-orientation metre are treated as genre- and rhythm-differentiated by Okuda himself, but the relationship between them — whether one is derivative of the other or they are independent — is not settled ‹contested› Okuda (2022: §5).